When C.H. Sisson was 20, he gave up writing poems. He began once more in his 30s under the stress of war-time, stationed in India. Verse came intermittently, exiguously; the bulk of his early writing in translation ('fishing in other men's waters' he calls it), prose essays and fiction. In the 1960s his poems began to appear.
The London Zoo - his first major book - was published in 1961 when the poet was 47. Since that time his place has grown secure: he is one of the few direct English heirs of the great Modernists, a poet who grounds the enormous energies of that movement in English landscapes, especially those of Somerset, and reconciles the legacies of Eliot and Pound on the one hand and of Hardy and Edward Thomas on the other. The epigraph of his 1984 Collected Poems, which this volume updates and corrects, was from John Gower:
O gentile Engleterre, a toi j'escrits.

About the Author

Born in Bristol in 1914, C. H. Sisson was noted as a poet, novelist, essayist and an important translator. He was a great friend of the critic and writer Donald Davie, with whom he corresponded regularly. Sisson was a student at the University of Bristol where he read English and Philosophy. As a poet he first came to light through the London Arts Review founded by the painter Patrick Swift and the poet David Wright. He reacted against the prevailing intellectual climate of the 1930s, particularly the Auden Group, preferring to go back to the anti-romantic T. E. Hulme, and to the Anglican tradition. The modernism of his poetry follows a 'distinct genealogy' from Hulme to Eliot, Pound, Ford Madox Ford and Wyndham Lewis. His novel Christopher Homm experiments with form and is told backwards. Sisson served in the British Army during World War II in India and joined the Ministry of Labour in 1936. He worked as a civil servant and wrote a standard text The Spirit of British Administration (1959) arising from his work and a comparison with other European methods. Sisson was a 'severe critic of the Civil Service and some of his essays caused controversy'. In his collection The London Zoo he writes this epitaph 'Here lies a civil servant. He was civil/ To everyone, and servant to the devil.' C. H. Sisson was made a Companion of Honour for services to literature in 1993.Carcanet publish his Collected Poems, his novels, essays, and his autobiography On the Lookout, as well as his versions of Dante, Virgil, La Fontaine, Du Bellay, Lucretius and others.

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